This edition of the newsletter provides updates on all three conferences organized by TC-11 (ICDAR, DAS, and ICFHR), along with two closely related conferences organized by members of the TC-11 community (ASAR and ICPRAI). ASAR is concerned with Arabic script analysis and recognition, while ICPRAI is being held to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the renown CENPARMI lab in Montréal (http://www.concordia.ca/research/cenparmi.html), which many members of our community have been members of, visited, or collaborated with. Congratulations to Dr. Ching Suen and his team on reaching this impressive milestone.

A brief summary of news included in this edition of the newsletter is provided below.

Conferences: Our flagship conference ICDAR 2017 is fast approaching. The conference web pages (http://u-pat.org/ICDAR2017/index.php) provide information about travel to Kyoto, the conference program, keynote speakers, tutorials, workshops, and our distinguished IAPR/ICDAR 2017 award winners. As a reminder for those planning to attend, online registration is open until October 9th (http://u-pat.org/ICDAR2017/attend_registration.php). Don't forget about the workshop on the future of Document Analysis and Recognition research, which is certain to produce interesting discussions and is free of charge for participants.

The official ICFHR 2018 (Niagara Falls) Call for Papers and Call for Competitions are now out. DAS 2018 (Vienna), ASAR 2018 (London), and ICPRAI 2018 (Montréal) also have Calls for Papers in this edition of the newsletter.

Journal Special Issues: The submission deadline for the IJDAR special issue on Deep Learning in Document Recognition is very soon (Sept. 30th). Submissions for another upcoming special issue on Document Image Processing in the Journal of Imaging are due Oct. 31st. Additional information can be found below.

Join us! If you are not already a member of the TC-11 community, please consider joining the TC11 mailing list.

We are pleased to announce the recipients of this year's IAPR/ICDAR Awards. The awards ceremony will be held during ICDAR 2017 in Kyoto, Japan.

IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award

Prof. Rangachar Kasturi for seminal research in document image analysis and graphics recognition shaping the evolution of the document image analysis field, and for outstanding leadership to both the ICDAR and the wider international pattern recognition community.

IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award

Dr. Alicia Fornés for outstanding contributions in the recognition of handwriting, text and graphics, with high impact to the field of Digital Humanities, and her service to the IAPR Technical Committee on Graphics Recognition.

Let's discuss the future of document analysis and recognition. In the history of ICDAR in the last 26 years, we have been working in a variety of fields of document analysis and recognition, and have solved many important problems. The emergence of machine learning technologies, however, has shifted the nature of unsolved problems. For example, improving accuracy of methods for existing problems attracts less researchers. This brings us to the following questions: What are exciting open problems that interest more researchers? What are research topics young researchers and outsiders of the ICDAR community cannot help joining us?

This workshop is planned to discuss possible research topics and open problems to start new chapters of research on document analysis and recognition.

Workshop Format

The purpose of the workshop is to have deeper discussions about the future of document analysis and recognition. For stimulating the discussion, we have short presentation by invited speakers listed below to share their views of the future. After the presentation, we select some representative topics for discussion. Then participants and invited speakers are divided into some groups of selected topics for discussion. The results of discussion will be summarized at the end of the workshop and final results will be presented at the main conference. We plan to have a short summary presentation at the banquet and more detailed presentation and discussion at the panel on the last day of the conference.

We are looking forward to your submissions for these Workshops. We also solicit your gracious support in circulating this information among your students, colleagues and scientific/research community to give it higher visibility.

Overview. DAS 2018 is the 13th edition of the 100% participation single-track IAPR sponsored workshop focusing on system-level issues and approaches in document analysis and recognition. The workshop comprises invited speaker presentations, oral, poster, tutorial and demo sessions as well as working group discussions.

DAS 2018 will be organized at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), in the heart of Vienna’s city center, which places the attendees within walking distance to a large variety of world-famous historical and cultural attractions. The program will include long and short papers, posters and demonstrations of working or prototype systems. All submissions will undergo a rigorous review process with a minimum of 3 reviews considering the originality of work, the quality of research or analysis of experience, the relevance to document analysis systems, and quality of presentation.

Information regarding paper submissions is provided below. Note: Submission of a paper involves a commitment that, if accepted, one or more authors will attend the workshop.

Full Papers. Full papers should describe complete works of original research. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered in another form, up to 6 pages length.

Short Papers. Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress and to present novel positions on document analysis systems. Authors may submit short papers (up to 2 pages in length). Short papers will also undergo review and will appear in an extra booklet, not in the official DAS 2018 proceedings.

Demonstrations. DAS 2018 seeks public demonstrations of novel systems, to be presented to the workshop as a whole during breaks between paper sessions. Prospective demonstrators should submit a two-page summary of the system to be demonstrated. Demonstration proposals will undergo review and summaries of accepted demonstrations will appear in the extra DAS 2018 booklet, as in the case of short papers.

The International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR) is the flagship conference for handwriting recognition research and applications. The conference brings together experts in handwriting recognition from academia and industry to share their experiences and promote research and development in all aspects of handwriting recognition and handwriting applications.

Authors are invited to submit full-length papers of not more than six (6) pages. Papers must describe original work, and paper reviews will be double blind. Instructions for paper submission will be available on the ICFHR 2018 web site (icfhr2018.org).

Questions about paper submission should be directed to the Program Chairs ( pc@icfhr2018.org ).

ICFHR 2018: Call for Competitions

8 January 2018: Submission of competition proposals
15 January 2018: Notification of acceptance
22 January 2018: Competitions on icfhr2018.org, open to participants.
1 June 2018: Full papers describing competitions due
29 June 2018: Accepted camera-ready papers due

The ICFHR 2018 Organizing Committee invites proposals for competitions addressing current research challenges in handwriting recognition and related areas of pattern recognition and vision. Competitions should aim at evaluating the performance of individual methods and systems that fall within the context of the conference’s Call for Papers. Competitions should also participate in the sharing and standardisation of handwriting recognition processes.

Proposal Requirements. Proposals should include a brief description of the competition, including the particular task under evaluation, and why this competition would be of interest to the ICFHR community. Please check online for the complete call with submission requirements and competition rules (http://icfhr2018.org/competitions.html).

Submissions of proposals. Proposals should be submitted by electronic mail to the ICFHR 2018 Competitions Chairs, Harold Mouchère and Nicholas Howe (competitions@icfhr2018.org).

Publication: Registered and Presented papers will be submitted for inclusion into IEEE Xplore as well as other Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) databases. Authors of some selected accepted papers presented at ASAR workshop will be invited to submit extended versions of their manuscripts for consideration in related international Journals.

Scope
It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Arabic and derived Script Analysis and Recognition (ASAR 2018), which will be hosted by the Alan Turing Institute, London, in collaboration with the LORIA laboratory (University Lorraine, France) and REGIM-Lab. (University of Sfax, Tunisia), and will be held in London (United Kingdom) on March 12-14, 2018. ASAR 2018 is technically co-sponsored by IEEE Region 8, IEEE UK&IR section, IEEE Tunisia section, and IAPR (under approval). The ASAR workshop provides an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners at all levels of experience to meet colleagues and to share new ideas and knowledge about Arabic and derived script document analysis and recognition methods. The workshop enjoys strong participation from researchers in both industry and academia. The workshop program will include keynote speakers, discussion sessions, and oral sessions.

Areas
Topics include but are not limited to the following:

Printed/Handwritten text recognition

Arabic Document image watermarking

Word spotting

Forensic Arabic document analysis

Language and script recognition

Historical Arabic document analysis

Authoring, annotation, and presentation systems

Pen-based user interface

Camera-based Arabic document image analysis

Arabic Document retrieval systems

Arabic Document analysis for mobile devices, for the internet

Information extraction

Arabic Document databases and digital libraries

Arabic Document understanding

Multilingual Arabic document analysis

Performance evaluation

Sponsors & Exhibitions
We invite your organisation to be a sponsor. It will play an essential role for the success of the workshop. We expect to welcome experts and researchers from all over the world and numerous high-ranking guests. Therefore, we anticipate extensive coverage of the event. To take advantage of these opportunities and to help enhance them, corporations, research centers, universities and individuals are invited to become sponsors of ASAR workshop. It will be a good opportunity to present your enterprise and your expertise to a distinguished audience. We are looking forward to a successful cooperation with you!

Venue
The Alan Turing Institute is the UK is a national institute for data science. Five universities (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, University College London and Warwick) and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences) created The Alan Turing Institute in 2015. The mission of The Alan Turing Institute is to make great leaps in data science research in order to change the world for the better. The Institute's goals are to undertake world-class research in data science, apply its research to real-world problems, driving economic impact and societal good, lead the training of a new generation of data scientists, and shape the public conversation around data.

To mark its 30th Anniversary, CENPARMI (Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence of Concordia University) is organizing an international conference on Pattern Recognition & Artificial Intelligence.

In recent years, applying Deep Learning techniques to Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) tasks has produced significant performance gains. These have included impressive advances in handwriting recognition, word-spotting in document images, document segmentation, and text detection in natural scenes.

This special issue aims to report new advances in DAR using deep learning methods. Articles presenting reviews, perspectives, new methods and applications in DAR are cordially invited. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to uses of Deep Learning for:

Document image processing and segmentation

Layout analysis

Character and text recognition

Scene text detection and recognition

Writer identification and signature analysis

Document retrieval

Context modeling

Graphics and symbol recognition

Other DAR tasks

Paper submissions are due September 30, 2017. For further information, please see the Call for Submissions.

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below:

The Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X) is currently running a Special Issue entitled Document Image Processing. Dr. Ergina Kavallieratou (University of the Aegean, Greece) and Dr. Laurence Likforman-Sulem (Telecom ParisTech/TSI) are serving as the Guest Editors for this Special Issue.

The intention of this Special Issue is to collect the experiences of leading scientists of the field, but also to be an assessment tool for people who are new to the world of document image processing.

This Special Issue intends to cover the following topics, but is not limited to them:

Document Image Analysis

Document Understanding

Document Analysis Systems

Document Processing

Camera-based Document Processing

Document Databases and Digital Libraries

Mining Document Image Collections

Document Forensics [...]

The deadline for manuscript submission is October 31, 2017. For more details please visit the website:

Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. We also encourage authors to send a short abstract or tentative title to the Editorial Office in advance (jimaging@mdpi.com and alma.wu@mdpi.com), as this will help us with planning.

The Journal of Imaging is an open access publication, which provides unlimited free access by readers. While open access publications typically require an article processing charge (or similar), the Journal of Imaging does not currently require authors to pay any sort of fee.

For further details on article formatting and the submission process, please see the instructions for authors at the journal website:

Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short
email to the editor, Richard Zanibbi ([1]).
Contributions might include conference and workshop
announcements/updates/reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything
else of interest to the TC-11 community.